Party time

This last weekend I took the 7 hour bus ride from Pedernales to Las Matas de Farfan, a town where I have spent a lot of time working over the years and have Dominican friends to visit and stay with.  It´s another town near the border, and for some reason has a little rougher feel, a fair amount of ¨tigeres¨´ or juvenile deliquents roaming the streets, but I always feel at home there, and I feel grateful to have learned how to bachata and meregue because of their funky, welcoming open air discos and plenty of willing partners.  Like Pedernales, it is no tourist destination and if you see a white person here they are either a missionary or a Menonite, of whom there are quite a few doing dairy and other types of farming in this lovely valley.   I have seen incremental civic improvements over the years; at least they spruced up the central park and now there is a roundabout with a wierd sculpture in the middle as you enter the town.  But they still have blackouts every day, usually around the most incovenient time, 6 pm which last until 2am when the lights suddenly flick back on when no one needs them.  By the time you get up in the morning, the lights are out again and come back on around 11am.  No one seems to be able to explain this phenomenon.... its worse during election time which is coming up in May.

I was invited to a party Sunday afternoon of one of my friend´s compadres´¨ out in a village called El Naranjo.  I knew there was going to be live music and dancing, so I decided to sacrifice Monday morning´s clinic for a little indulgence.  It was way out in the hills, about 45 minutes up dusty rock strewn paths on motorcycle, in a humble family compound nestled under some limestone cliffs the formed a ridge above us.  The band was playing when we got there, a great tipico merengue band of country boys; accordion, bass, and tambora, a typical dominican drum with two sides played with sticks and the guira, a percussion instrument that looks like a cheese grater, played with a scratcher.  The whole scene reminded me of some blowouts I used to go to in Maine with live music, people of all ages, food cooking for the masses and the usual inebriates.  Dozens of people, kids and grandparents were grinding away on a dirt floor under a straw roof, shading us from the intense sun of mid afternoon.  chickens, donkeys, horses, goats, all wandering around ad lib.  Just next to the dancefloor was another small building with a candlelit altar full of images of the virgin and St Miguel, Antonio and others unknown to me, as well as bottles of soda, rum, wine, cigarettes and large bowls of rice sprinkled with colorful bits of fruit, candy, nuts and adorned with a candle on top.  People sat inside singing call and response prayers in front of the altar and intermittantly standing up to ring a little bell at the altar and restart some incantation. After a few hours of singing, praying, drinking and dancing a huge meal appeared in the backyard, cooked camp out style in huge caldrons for the 100 or so attendees.  Goat, beans and rice and chen chen, a dish i´ve never seen before, looking and tasting like a rough hewn polenta, delicious.  They use plastic bags to cover the pots of rice and beans as they simmer away, but with rum, aguadiente, and parasites, who minds a few PCBs ???

As the sun was beginning to set we all marched about a half mile through the woods to a river, originating out of the white cliffs, where a little spring came up from the earth and between the root structure of this enormous ceiba tree.  There was the rezadora, or ¨prayer lady.¨¨ I had seen her before in the little altar building and in the pavillion doing some gestures reminicient of vodou, provoking the crowd around her as she danced with a cup of water on her head.  she was dressed in a little girls´sailor dress with a wide collar and pleated skirt and began to set up her altar by the edge of the river, flanked by her assistants who were chanting and waving flags in her direction.  With the band reconstucted themselves over the rocky edge of the river and with 100 people looking on in silence, the rezadora began tossing rice from the bowls into the river, and at all of us bystanders, muttering prayers, pouring rum, wine and fanta into the river, tinting this clear  virgin spring blood red.  She was blowing air through her lips as if she was trying not to push while giving birth, twirling around and around barefoot in the river with a large bowl of rice and chicken on her head. Someone handed her a lit cigar which she puffed fervently, spueing smoke everywhere.  Eventually she got herself into such a state, egged on by her cotarie that she started having a seizure that landed her down into the shallow waters covered with rocks, so her dress was ballooning up out of the water and she was entirely submerged, her body triggered by spasms that resemble fornication. 

Senor Santana and his grupo

everyone can move their hips!

the altar in living color

a party animalita

plastic works as a pot cover in a crunch

chen chen

la rezadora whirling

twirling

calling saints and sinners

Santana squeezing

puffing 2 cigarettes

Many people casually looked on and my friend was chattng with one of his buddies during the whole production,  but I was pretty transfixed and also pissed as hell that my iphone camera battery had run out just as we neared the river.  So sorry!!  But here are a few shots, woops, they landed up above